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Selling a house with kids and pets
People sell houses all the time with pets and kids, why am I having such a hard time wrapping my head around how we are going to do it?
How do you keep the house picked up with kids and pets?
Where do the pets go if there is a showing during the middle of the day and I'm at work? Dog is kenneled and the cat will hide. My over active imagination was thinking last night though- what if the cat dies and someone comes to look at the house and here's this dead cat? How embarrassing and disgusting for a potential buyer.
And the doggie door insert we bought, our dog is afraid of it.
Also, why do I feel guilty getting rid of stuff or putting stuff up until we find a new house? Stupid emotional attachments. We have 5 (maybe 6) sets of salt and pepper shakers. We don't need 5. One set FIL made, one set was a wedding gift, another is from my great-grandma, another matches our dishes and another set is a nice set dh bought on sale at Borsheims. We don't even use one of the sets. It's kind of funny, at least dh and I were laughing about it.
Re: Selling a house with kids and pets
First: rent a dumpster (we used A Quick Dump, no end to the laughs over that one) & clean your WHOLE house, top to bottom, closets, everything. Get rid of anything you don't need - donate it or dump it.
Next: rent a Pod & fill it with anything you aren't actively using for the next few months. We put off season clothes, camping gear, even pictures from our walls that we took down for staging. Furniture that can be put away should go in there too - paring your rooms down a little bit can make them look more spacious.
Get a cleaning lady or prepare to spend some SERIOUS time cleaning. Windows, scrub baseboards, the whole nine yards.
I would do your best to get them out of the house for showings- buyers will not like having your pets there. I was way creeped out by a stranger's cat skulking around my legs. If possible take them out & any evidence that they live there - no cat food bowls sitting out, etc.
Basically I cleaned every night after my kids went to bed & then picked everything up in the morning so it would be ready for a showing if one turned up. Our house sold in 28 days & the eventual buyer actually asked if we were living in the house b/c it was "so clean." I mostly credit the cleaning ladies for that.
Good luck - if you don't have an agent we could not have been more thrilled with ours (as I said, 28 days & 2K below asking price - poor guy WAY overpaid for our house). She was just amazing & I would recommend her to anyone - Kris Swanson with DEEB.
I definitely agree with the de-cluttering and the idea of trying to make it look like you don't have pets. I am going to be in the same boat as you when we try to sell next year. However, we have a dog door and a dog run, so it will be kind of obvious there are dogs! When I bought my house, I know the owners would just pack the dogs up and drive around until showings were over (they requried like an hour or two notice so they could arrange it). And I have no clue where to hide the cats and the litter box.
As far as pictures and stuff go, I have always heard you should take them down, but I really think it depends on what kind of market your buyers are in. Do you have a starter home? My house was the first one I bought, so I probably wasn't as picky as I should have been, but they had pictures out, and it didn't bother me.
Good luck!
I?m going to second the POD idea. Clean out everything you have in ?storage? in your house so you can put all the stuff you use that you don?t want people to see in there. And sparsely used storage looks good too. Extra furniture, pictures, etc goes in there. You won?t miss it, or cleaning or picking up around it either.
Selling your house doesn?t have to take months! You might be without that stuff for only a short while. But do make sure to have everything in order for a sale the moment you put it on the market. You get most of your showings in the first week you list, so be prepared and don?t think that you?ll have time to get it done later.
Pets do turn some people off, but they?re a fact of life and we never removed our cats for showings, but did hide the litter and food. I know they hide as long as other people are in the house.
But with pets and kids, I won?t lie, it?s a major pita. I wouldn?t try to live your life in a spotless environment, but do try to be available to come home at a moment?s notice to straighten. Showings while you?re at work are a dream compared to having to pack up everyone and straighten on a week night/weekend.
thanks to jennied
We have two dogs, and even though I didn't think my house smelled like dog, everyone that came through said it did. After hearing this multiple times, even after scrubbing and using air fresheners and what not, we ended up buying this Zero Odor stuff from QVC and I also bought Scentsy. I had the Scentsy going upstairs and sprayed the basement with the zero odor and we never got a comment about dog smell after that. I will say, that when we were looking at houses, I smelled dog or cat right away. So, def. be mindful of the odor thing. The cat odor really turned me off and it was a deal breaker in a couple instances.
And we usually took our dogs over to my BIL's and let them run around his fenced yard when we had our showings. We went to a couple houses where dogs were in the kennel in the basement barking at us, and that was really weird, IMO.
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/view.2/app.detail/params.aol_refer.false.tpl.detail.msn_refer.false.item.V29899.ref.BV1?
We required two hours prior to any showing - so we had time to go home from work and remove all pet-related stuff. We only had the basics out while our house was the market, but we loaded up the litter box, dog bed, and pets into our car for all showings.
We did lose two showings, because they weren't willing to give us the two hours. But, we figured if they wanted to see the house bad enough, two hours was nothing - especially when it was during the week.
I second everyone's recommendations on storing stuff. At first it's scary (and we don't have kids!), but we packed away just about everything thing we could. The house was SO much emptier, which was kind of nice when it came time to pack up - a lot of it had already been done!
I'm sure Tera would have some good ideas - but you are definitely going to have to work with your pup and the doggy door. It will take time - but work with him, praise him with treats, etc. when he eventually gets comfortable with trying to go through it.